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Dagoberto Gilb

Bio: 
Dagoberto Gilb was born in the city of Los Angeles, his mother a Mexican who crossed the border illegally, and his father a Spanish-speaking Anglo raised in East Los Angeles. He studied philosophy and religion at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and graduated with both bachelor's and master's degrees. After that, he began his life as a construction worker, eventually joining the union in Los Angeles; a member of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners. As a class-A journeyman carpenter, his employment for the next twelve years was on high-rise buildings, including MOCA. His books include The Magic of Blood (1993), which won the 1994 PEN/Hemingway Award, ,i>The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña (1994), A New York Times Notable Book of the Year, Woodcuts of Women (2001), and Gritos (2003). Gilb recently published, as its editor, Hecho en Tejas: An Anthology of Texas Mexican Literature (2006). He is now a tenured professor in the Creative Writing Program at Texas State University, in San Marcos, Texas.

Dagoberto Gilb

In Conversation With Howard Junker
Sunday, May 4, 1997
ALOUD
Listen:
Episode Summary

Dagoberto Gilb, of Anglo and Mexican heritage, calls both El Paso and Los Angeles home and is a union carpenter with a degree in philosophy. Gilb's rich experiences translate into stories that range the width of his native desert lands. He has been called "a powerful, necessary voice in American literature whose emergence defies any pigeon-holing." He is a winner of the James D. Phelan Award in Literature, the Whiting Award, the Dobie-Paisano Fellowship from the Texas Institute of Letters, and a recipient of an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship. He is the author of The Last Residence of Mickey Acuna and  The Magic of Blood, stories which Jim Harrison said: "deal with a portion of society that literature seldom ever reaches."

Howard Junker is the founding editor & publisher of ZYZZYVA, a quarterly of West Coast writers and artists.

This program was produced as part of the 1997 season of Racing Toward the Millennium: Voices from the American West in partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. The media has been digitized with minor edits.

Participant(s) Bio

The Flowers: A Novel

In conversation with Marisela Norte
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
01:10:18
ALOUD
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Episode Summary
From one of this country's most original voices comes a masterful new novel about a young Mexican-American who falls in love while sweeping the decks of an apartment building named The Flowers. In the midst of exploding racial violence, he must decide what he values and what he can do about it.
Participant(s) Bio
Dagoberto Gilb was born in the city of Los Angeles, his mother a Mexican who crossed the border illegally, and his father a Spanish-speaking Anglo raised in East Los Angeles. He studied philosophy and religion at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and graduated with both bachelor's and master's degrees. After that, he began his life as a construction worker, eventually joining the union in Los Angeles; a member of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners. As a class-A journeyman carpenter, his employment for the next twelve years was on high-rise buildings, including MOCA. His books include The Magic of Blood (1993), which won the 1994 PEN/Hemingway Award, ,i>The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña (1994), A New York Times Notable Book of the Year, Woodcuts of Women (2001), and Gritos (2003). Gilb recently published, as its editor, Hecho en Tejas: An Anthology of Texas Mexican Literature (2006). He is now a tenured professor in the Creative Writing Program at Texas State University, in San Marcos, Texas.

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